FEMINIST LEGAL METHODS

Legal methods are the basic tools that lawyers and legal scholars use. Critics of law have sought to challenge and develop alternatives to traditional methodologies. In this Article, Professor Bartlett identifies and critically examines a set of feminist legal methods. These techniques, grounded in women's experiences of exclusion, include "asking the woman question," feminist practical reasoning, and consciousness-raising. Each of these methods is both critical and constructive, and helps to reveal features of a legal issue that more traditional methods tend to overlook or suppress. Professor Bartlett then addresses the epistemological implications of feminist legal methods by examining the nature of the claims to truth that they generate. After analyzing three theories of knowledge reflected in feminist legal writing - rational empiricism, standpoint epistemology, and postmodernism - Professor Bartlett offers a fourth approach, positionality, which she believes provides for feminists the best explanation of what it means to be "right" in law. Positionality retains a concept of nonarbitrary truth based upon experience, yet because it deems truth situated and provisional rather than external or final, it obligates feminists to use their methods to continue to extend and transform this truth.